The last post discussed why 3 is a terrible number of legs for a species to have, contra the Idirans in the prominent sci-fi novel Consider Phlebas. The physicist’s obvious next question is how we generalize expected number of legs to higher dimensions.

(Caveat 1: if inclined, stop and think about this for a bit now; untouched puzzles don’t come around all that often, especially this more-conceptual and less-mathematical kind. If you are the opposite and want only the answer, the abstract is at the bottom.)

(Caveat 2: there are usually reasons why life could not exist with very different physical parameters than we have, called the fine-tuning paradox in physics and heavily debated. This extends to number of spatial dimensions. So don’t assume life could actually exist in these other dimensions: this is a purely theoretical exercise.)

On the surface of a planet in 3-dimensional space, gravity pulls in one dimension through a 2-dimensional plane (the ground). A 2-d plane is defined by 3 points (a 1-d line defined by 2 points, and a 0-d point defined by 1 point, so we can say that an N-dimensional plane is defined by N+1 points). For an animal to stand straight up, it needs to keep itself on the defined plane of the ground, which means 3 points of contact. This is pretty close to the definition of stability, but we need an extra leg to move (for reasons explained in the Idiran post). For D-dimensional space, if we still imagine gravity as pointing in a single direction (which physically it should), we then have defined a plane with D-1 dimensions needing D legs for stability and D+1 legs on the most prevalent animals.

If you are checking me, you’ll notice that this gives 4 legs for our world, a prescient model given the number of earthly quadrupeds. However, strange life forms abound on earth: snakes have 0 legs, sea creatures have as many as they want to, some creatures—I kid you not—fly through gas, and humans themselves are bipedal. For simplicity, I generally ignore these. Gas- and liquid-dwellers have numerous forms, snakes I deal with in the comments, and humans are strange. We have freed up two of our legs to become arms, and might conjecture that the first “intelligent” or “environment-changing” organism would for this reason have (some?) arms and thus (a few?) less legs than the norm for the dimension. However, note that humans do touch their heels to the ground to establish third and fourth points of contact. Now try standing on tiptoe.

For our primary model of D+1 legs, second order corrections are now in order. We somewhat expect bilateral symmetry, in which case we always get an even number of legs and end up with D+1+(D+1 MOD2). We might also consider that at higher dimensions, animals would have enough legs that they would want several extra for moving, to preclude them from taking forever to move all 11 legs one at a time while walking. We’ll keep this in mind, but generally stick with D+1 for simplicity.

However, there are further considerations that play a role: we noticed earlier that radial symmetry is more prevalent in seagoing animals that can move in all 3 dimensions and have gravity “screened” off by the fluid around them. A possibility is that, in 4-D space and above where the defined plane is already greater than or equal to 3 dimensions, animals might have more radial symmetry and thus have fairly varying numbers of legs. The naïve argument fails because, despite the plane you can move in being 3 or more dimensions, you still need legs supporting you in the direction that matters. However, other symmetry arguments might bring weight to bear. A good thought experiment here is to, instead of going upward in dimension, to go down: in 2 dimensions, your planet becomes a circle, so an ocean will be 2-d and land will be 1-d (incidentally, the changing laws of gravity and electromagnetism make stars unstable here, so no 2-d life in the near future). Now any animal on land has a confusing relationship with bilateral symmetry: it has only 2 dimensions to live in, with gravity pointing in one of them. It has two options for bilateral symmetry then. If gravity points down, it could have symmetry from right to left with legs on bottom, in which case it can move either direction, but now probably needs two mouths (in 2-d space, the digestive tract would also cut through the organism, a whole new problem in itself). The other option is to have bilateral symmetry between up and down, effectively forcing two legs on the bottom and two on the top, with a mouth at one end and then flipping its whole body in order to point left instead of right. It could get around this with simple radial symmetry, like a Paramecium with cilia surrounding its body. In sea, bilateral symmetry becomes more reasonable, because bilateral “fish” could turn around by swimming upward and downward. Radial symmetry seems usually used by organisms with their mouths facing downward in the sea, like starfish and jellyfish, but this is impossible in 2-d.

Given that in 2-d bilateral symmetry seems to partially dominate in the sea while neither works well on land, while in 3-d radial is only in the sea but bilateral dominates both land and sea, what should we expect in 4-d? Since there are no turning issues past 2-d, I would expect bilateral symmetry to outcompete radial symmetry once again in 4-d. Further, the foray into 2-d suggested that jumping up a dimension would lead to new symmetry possibilities. It is difficult to imagine, but we can extrapolate some. A 3-d bilateral organism has legs down in the z-axis (asymmetric), a digestive tract pointing in the y-direction (asymmetric), with the bilateral symmetry a reflection in the x-axis. A radially symmetric organism has legs and digestive tract both down in the z-axis, and the x-y plane radially symmetric. In 4-d, we imagine a “bilateral” animal to have legs down in the z-axis, the digestive tract along the y-axis, and the symmetry to be in the w-x plane. However, we now have a whole plane for symmetry, and one begins to get creative. We could have it symmetric in the w and x axes (double bilateral symmetry), or make it radially symmetric in this plane (imagine putting the 2-d w-x plane into polar coordinates). An animal with radial symmetry here could look kind of like a 4-d worm with legs. I raise you all-in, Dune.

It is hard to visualize radial symmetry in this sense, and I’m hard-pressed to say how this would make the legs look. However, it seems to work mathematically, so I’ll run with it. In this case, for every two extra free dimensions, you could add either radial symmetry or two instances of bilateral symmetry. But… what about three free dimensions?

In our own 3-d space, we only have things like green algae that are spherically-symmetric. But this generates the generalization: bilateral symmetry is 1-d, radial symmetry is 2-d, spherical symmetry is 3-d, and N-spherical symmetry is N-d. Asymmetric dimensions reduce our “free dimension” count, as the legs and digestive tract reduced our count above. Then we can fill out our 4-d organism pantheon: asymmetric (0), bilateral (1), double bilateral (2), radial (2), triple bilateral (3), biradial (3), spherical (3), quadruple bilateral (4), bispherical (4), double bilateral plus radial (4), double radial (4), and 4-spherical (4). This counts to 12 possible symmetries (1+1+2+3+5), and looking like a Fibonacci sequence. However, when we get to 5 dimensions, we end up with quintuple bilateral (5), triple bilateral plus radial (5), double bilateral plus spherical (5), bilateral plus 4-spherical (5), bilateral plus double radial (5), radial plus spherical (5), and 5-spherical (5); there are 7 of these new symmetries, bringing us to (1+1+2+3+5+7), and we can recognize this as the partition sequence (the total number of partitions of D, or unique combinations of positive integers that sum to D), which is of course exactly how we were counting the symmetries anyways.

To constrain our blossoming imaginations, we should note a few expectations. Firstly, only the lamest organisms are completely asymmetric, and radial organisms tend to be outperformed even in their main no-effective-gravity environments due to their poor motility. Further, we only need an even number of legs if we have a bilateral dimension, so our 4-d legworm could have the optimal D+1 (5) legs in this case if I’m visualizing it right (actually not sure on this one). We also know that in 3-d, where radial, biradial, and spherical symmetries are only employed by the simplest organisms, all dominant animals have two asymmetric dimensions for legs and digestion and all the rest of the dimensions (1) bilateral. Given this, it seems almost certain that in higher dimensions we would see D-2 dimensions be symmetric; in other words, for the partition sequence p(n), though there are ∑n=0Dp(n) possible symmetries, we only expect to see p(D-2) symmetry combinations or fewer employed by dominant animals. There will be an additional p(D-1)+p(D) combinations that are rarely used (the higher-D analogues to spherical, biradial, and radial in our world). The dominant p(D-2) combinations are probably culled down to one or two that dominate the landscape, because, as Stuart Russell puts it in an abridged form of one of my favorite quotations,

“A system that is optimizing a function of n variables, where the objective depends on a subset of size k<n, will often set the remaining unconstrained variables to extreme values…”

Then we can, in our refined approximation, expect that organisms with two asymmetric dimensions and either D-2 bilateral symmetries or D-2-spherical symmetry will be the most prevalent (note that D-2-spherical symmetry in 3-d is just bilateral symmetry).

We can refine this a little further with extra biological considerations. An animal with a bilateral dimension can house the eyes and ears, both of which need two copies so as to judge distance (eyes) and direction (ears). One could go further into possible quadruple-ear-hypotheses (more bilateral symmetries) for triangulating direction in high-D space, but since humans can’t tell direction along our plane of symmetry very well (whether a noise is directly behind you or directly above you) this might not be so important. From this, we might revise our expectations for a decent chance that an organism will have one instance of bilateral symmetry, with the remaining dimensions covered by D-3-spherical symmetry (this also fits with the 3-d world, if you check, because D-3-spherical symmetry drops out).

Going back to our original leg problem helps us as well. We expect D+1 legs on the dominant species if it has D-2-spherical symmetry; bilateral plus D-3-spherical symmetry might instead show D+1+(D+1 MOD2) legs; D-2 bilateral symmetries now constrain the animal to having some fairly symmetric set of legs. Assuming that no single leg is down the center of a line of bilateral symmetry (though it is possible this could happen), we then need the legs to be some number 2^n for the smallest n such that 2^n > D+1. This could be very impractical for an 8-dimensional dog that suddenly needs 16 legs instead of 9 to walk upright; near these cutoff dimensions we might expect limb savings in the form of a human’s heel adaptation to replace a limb, or else several less dimensions of bilateral symmetry. Instead of 6 for our 8-dimensional dog, we could end up with only 4 plus radial symmetry for the other 2 dimensions. This could give us a dog with 4 legs in bilateral dimensions repeated 3 times over the radial plane, for a total of 12, or 2 legs repeated 5 times. At this point, I am no longer sure whether this is a self-consistent picture; please point out if I am eliding over any symmetry constraints that invalidate it. Further, please feel free to add more biology if it at all constrains the symmetries or legs we might expect.

ETA: Brief discussion in the comments of why I have assumed all legs are 1-d, and why we expect few feet greater than 2-d.

Abstract: We have found that for any D-dimensional universe, the most prevalent number of legs will probably be D+1, or some slightly higher correction like D+(D/6) to help the animal move more than one leg at a time. The animal will likely have D-3-spherical plus bilateral symmetry so as to end up with D+1+(D+1 MOD2) legs and stereoscopic sight and direction hearing, or may just have D-2-spherical symmetry. There is also a good chance of D-2 bilateral symmetries, especially at low dimension and when the number of D+1 legs is at or just under some 2^n. The animal will almost certainly have D-2 total symmetric dimensions (in total, p(D-2) symmetry options for the partition function p), but there also should be some quantity of simpler animals with D-1 symmetries and even D symmetries. Less than D-2 symmetries should indicate the higher-dimensional equivalent of sponges, very simplistic organisms.

The Idirans are a powerful race from Consider Phlebas, the first book of Iain Banks’ “Culture” series. Each is very strong, several times larger than a human, and is tripedal. A creative choice, but three legs is the very worst number.

In the most basic sense, to make a free-standing structure stable requires at least 3 points of contact on the ground (if you try to balance a V upside down on its two points, it would just fall down to the side; this is why humans put cameras on tripods). But to move, an organism needs to be able to lift up at least one of its legs. Then four legs should be the minimum for most land-dwelling species.

Like a typical physicist, I’ve elided over several of the messier engineering aspects here. Some animals do not use four legs: humans and pangolins, the two most awesome species on the planet, both walk on two legs. They do this by actually putting their heelbone on the ground, in contrast to most mammals that walk on their toes (hooves are toes, etc). Doing this essentially provides them four points of contact for stability. Other animals use four or more legs to walk but move at speed on two, like kangaroos, lizards, and cockroaches, both in real life and in your nightmares from now on. Birds use two legs but frequently have toes pointing backwards, and also suck at walking [citation needed]. In all these cases, having less than four legs either comes at a disadvantage or is somehow worked around.

However, you should now grow suspicious. Why is there all this talk of twos and fours, without 3? How would we build a 3-legged animal if we were to go about it ourselves, being the intelligent creator that evolution never could be? First we might want to look at the nearest neighbors.

Kangaroos use their tail as a figurative third leg in some circumstances, like when boxing, the closest we get to the Idiran morphology. The tripod fish rests on three spines, two from pelvic fins and one from a caudal fin, and does not move like this for the stability reasons stated above. But both of these examples use a tail as a fake third leg, which we don’t want. Why not build an actual third leg into the organism if this structure is good for fitness? Why do 0 animals have this?

The unfinished answer is that it seems very difficult to create organisms at scale without symmetry. DNA is currently the most information-dense object in the universe, and is as such being used by the superhero George Church to make far more compact hard drives, but even with that title is far too underpowered to specify the placement and type and content of every cell of the body. Scientists are delving into epigenetic processes and how large-scale structure can emerge at the moment, but I have to be pretty hand-wavy here. And yet we can see empirically that every animal more complex than a sponge exhibits either radial or bilateral symmetry (organisms do break symmetry at times, but only for important things like the heart or human brain). Radial symmetry is better compression information-theoretically, because you can form 16 parts of an organism for the price of one, and works well underwater where all directions are functionally the same. However, bilateral symmetry dominates on land, possibly due to considerations of being confined to a plane. Given its dominance on the earth, there is probably some other reason though. I might conjecture that mitosis plays a part, because a cell splits into two, but all we can really do is note that this is entirely dominant. Further, evolution briefly tried a mix of the two called biradial symmetry and immediately cast it aside as an underperformer (octopodes, despite their seeming eight radial legs and two bilateral eyes, are entirely bilateral).

Given these symmetry considerations, to build a three-legged organism, we would have a few options. We could replace mitosis with something like tritosis, but this is unlikely to work because unzipping DNA falls into two halves. We could replace DNA so that it fell into thirds, but this seems really hard for structural reasons (any biochemists out there who want to postulate a mechanism are free to do so). Since the information pipeline is the main issue, we could add some compression algorithm much stronger than the current savings through symmetry and epigenetics that scientists haven’t yet fleshed out. This also seems hard, given the huge savings already in place, but could be possible. We could also replace DNA with a more compressed info source. Unfortunately, given that DNA stores one bit for every roughly 80 atoms and is in a very tight structure already, we could only get a further factor of a few from this through using a different chemical with fewer atoms per bit or better folding properties. This is probably not enough to be able to fully replace symmetry’s compression, but perhaps doable if we naively assume bilateral symmetry to have only a factor of two compression rate and search through all the organic compounds possible.

And yet, even after we figure out how to build one, would it ever be worth it? If we look a little further into the kinematics from the beginning, we can say probably not. A four-legged beast can pick up a leg as long as its center of gravity is within the triangle created by their other three points of contact. They naturally have their center of gravity either touching all four possible triangles or very close to it (think about it for yourself). This requires only a miniscule movement to free any leg for stepping. Similarly, humans evolved wider hips so that they could rotate their legs toward the center of their body, keeping both legs under them and requiring only a tiny bit of a shift to move from one to the other, as you have undoubtedly noticed during dull cocktail parties. A three-legged being can either adopt the humans’ method of keeping their legs under them or spread them wider. If the legs are spread wide, the Idiran would have two options: shift all of its weight from the center of the triangle the edge that the two planted legs are on, so it would not begin to topple immediately, or else take a rapid step that then had to decelerate the falling body. This step of catching a fall is very energy-intensive, and shifting its weight to one triangle-edge would be quite bad as well (which is worse is a question for the engineers). And no cop-outs saying that maybe it had enough energy to spare: evolving three legs is difficult, so if four legs were better, it should evolve these instead. If it opted instead to keep its legs under it like humans, it would quickly notice that it was walking and standing in a linear motion just like humans, and losing most of the stability benefit accorded by the third leg. At this point, the third leg has become almost more of a burden than a benefit: imagine yourself with a third leg. How would you coordinate the steps so that you stayed on balance, and didn’t get any legs in front of another? It is difficult. Perhaps possible, when stretching for creativity, but very difficult.

To me, it seems fairly unlikely that a large three-legged organism would evolve. The books imply it has biradial symmetry with radial legs and bilateral torso, so at the very least this should probably be replaced with a fully radial body: three arms, three eyes, etc. I would bet a small amount of money at 5:1 odds that less than 5% of animals we find on other planets are tripedal, or 40:1 that the first dominant species we find is not tripedal (or something, I’m trying to make this possible to actually evaluate at some time in the future), and 2:1 that fewer than 10% of species that are tripedal are also biradial. If anyone wants to take these bets or propose an alternative, let me know.

I don’t wish to be the small-minded person whose boxes the sci-fi writers are actively trying to think outside of. Overconfidence is truly one of our biggest curses. My concern is only that this is one of the situations where our constant overconfidence has been replaced by an almost mythic demand for underconfidence, and that has real ramifications on humanity’s forecasting ability. Whether a reader or an author, taking a few moments to consider whether there are underlying constraints that make something implausible is a very helpful background process to run. We know a lot more about astroeconomics and astrobiology than some people would have you think.

I also want to say that small centaurs should be dominant everywhere. What’s up with that, evolution?

Tl;dr: Everyone is pretty overconfident about their pet nutrition theory (even you). We also trust announced panaceas too much, whether it’s a new diet today or bloodletting 2000 years ago.

I recently read The China Study, a book on nutrition. Or, rather, a bit over half. I stopped after a few hours because he was starting to repeat the narrative over and over, and I wanted to look at rebuttals before I put in the time to finish the book. I should clarify, at this point the book sounded pretty convincing.

The go-to rebuttal was written by Denise Minger, and took her a month to write and almost that long for me to read (over an hour). After reading it, it too sounded pretty convincing.

I aired my thoughts to a family friend, and his defense of The China Study sounded pretty convincing too.

This is not a healthy pattern. Luckily, at each point, I realized what was going on. I had gone into this endeavor with a highly, almost radically skeptical mindset, and it paid off. But many times, I and others aren’t so lucky.

One of my housemates sometimes complains that he believes too many things he reads. I completely empathize; humans evolved such big brains largely to make very compelling arguments. Nearly everyone disseminating information to us has an incentive to exaggerate as much as they can get away with, be it reporters, peddlers, researchers, or Donald Trump. Even researchers, whom we usually think of as trustworthy in cases other than climate change, are still motivated to exaggerate: if they can sway their field or the public to think their work more important than it is, it means more citations or media attention for them. Much of this is because good hypotheses are hard to come by; if a compelling one presents itself it may be your only chance for fame, and you certainly don’t want to pass that up because the data is unlucky. From HPMOR, ch. 78:

[He] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not his best idea, I fear, but rather [his] only idea.

This trend is especially, especially prevalent in nutrition. Having such wide interaction with the public, with so many people willing to early adopt the latest supposed panacea, leads to potent incentives to rush to press with the first tenable idea rather than double-check. How many one-shot diet solutions have there been over the years? For every big one, there are also numerous small ones: reduce sodium, take ginseng, etc. The FDA doesn’t regulate supplements, so that domain is of course a cesspool, but it hasn’t even done very well on the food and drugs it has been created for. The recommended daily allowances (RDAs) it releases have been revised in very different directions over the years, and some have said that the failure of their low fat recommendations in past decades condemned hundreds of thousands to cardiac- and obesity-related deaths.

The diet pushed in the China Study is plant-based, with no meat protein. But it is not enough to judge it based on the health evidence put forth—there are other directly conflicting diets that claim similar results, including low-carb and low-fat, each with their own apparently overwhelming evidence. You might protest that many low-fat diets have already been debunked, but this makes me more worried rather than less. After decades of government and scientific support for fat reduction in our diets (not only support, but fantastic promises of weight loss, elixir of life, and virgins) turned out to be faulty, it seems proper to be very skeptical of further diets claiming to Get Rid of This One Nutrient and Have All Your Problems Solved, even if, like the China Study, they look like they are firmly backed by evidence.

Why is “evidence” not the cut and dry standard of truth that the 21 million people in IFLS would have you believe? This is an important ground rule for science, and nutrition above all: it’s surprisingly easy to get results in favor of whatever you want. The latest viral post about it is from our stats heroes at 538, showing how you, yes you, can manipulate data to prove with statistical significance that either democrats or republicans have a positive effect on the national economy. Similarly, Scott Alexander shows how even parapsychologists researching telepathy can reliably find a needle of signal in a haystack of noise, and one of them produced a p-value of 10^-10, effectively damning all of science. This comes a decade after Ioannidis first published his pair of findings about how many studies in medicine, etc, are non-replicable or overstated (somewhere between 10 and 90%, depending on how strict you are).

So. Not only do we have many competing hypotheses, but many of them have good evidence. It is perhaps not surprising why no one knows what is going on.

While certainly annoying for those with practical concerns about nutrition, one man’s trash is another man’s epistemological goldmine. And mine it we must, with the state of the data.

I am highly intrigued at the possibilities nutrition offers to train rationality. If you missed out on the chance to test yourself on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics vs the Copenhagen interpretation because Yudkowsky did it for you, there are still many others in evolutionary theory, catastrophetheory, Greek history, etymology, Pinker vs Taleb on the Long Peace, the AGI safety problem, futurology, and more. Usually these are fairly two-sided, and some are more complex than others. On one side of the spectrum, simple case studies in rationality with limited options abound, as you notice when reading the irrational things other people write; but a truly godawful mess like nutrition research only comes around once in a blue moon.

Yudkowsky talked every once in a while about the rationalist community, musing on how to build a formal course of study or a formal order of members. In a few short stories, he called them the Bayesian Conspiracy. To be initiated, one must pass a short test against biases; later, their master had them practice rationality by working on large open problems in science. Unfortunately, most genuine problems in science have enormous barriers to entry, and require you to devote substantial temporal resources to even having a shot at them. His storyline seems a little unrealistic (though don’t let me stop you from shooting for the stars).

Whereas solving the hardest theoretical problems from a classroom might be too difficult for reality, sifting through the empirical data in nutrition science sounds, while still painful and hard, much more tenable. Some of the better known rationalists have already been here: Scott Alexander notes that himself, Luke Muehlhauser, and Romeo Stevens are all unimpressed by low-carb diets, and asks this position to be inducted as Rationalist Consensus. Luke’s is a beautiful leviathan about low-carb diets on behalf of the Open Philanthropy project. Alexander has written about wheat, Taubes, and a paleo-ish diet, but he’s cheating because he’s a doctor. These are fantastic analyses. They make me trust the rationality of the person more. These are the kind of Rationalist Theses I would expect from one trying to prove themselves.

But before you run off and consume these write-ups (hopefully I am not already too late), I again want to encourage you to try the exercises yourself. This is like a coloring book: there are a lot of pages, so you aren’t likely to run out fast, but you can’t re-use them and all the good ones tend to end up finished first by you or your friends.

The reason they’re hard to re-use is because being blind to the expected result is one of the foremost qualities of nutrition (for rational testing; this is almost exactly the opposite of its intended). Nutrition has a long history of being wrong on almost every level many times in a row, so this is great to train an open mind (or non-overconfident priors). And because it’s been wrong about almost everything, nutrition has an almost infinite number of sub-problems. Is salt good? Are megadoses of vitamin C good? What about other vitamins taken separately? What about animal protein? What about gluten? Tryptophan does weird things, how do we feel about that? Etc etc. The last great characteristic recommending nutrition for this role is that the barriers to entry are low: I can upperbound the scholastic prerequisites at AP Bio, and a single high school biology course (with some wikipedia supplementation) might certainly be enough too. Anything else, you can learn as you go from wikipedia.

To put my time where my mouth is, I’m writing up a review of The China Study and Whole now. If any others of you see nutrition’s shitshow for the golden opportunity that it is and decide to test yourself, for training purposes or to signal to others, let me know. I’m interested in compiling both questions and verdicts (partly to test for overconfidence, so be warned). If you are the 99% and are somewhere on the spectrum of not actually going to spend your time on that, I hold no grudges—but if nothing else from this post, remember how easy it is to be swayed by promises of solutions to your problems, how easy it is to build a convincing argument for any nutritional verdict, and how likely it is that any opinion you hold now is overconfident and will be overthrown in the next few decades.

ETA: even medical science has been shown to later recant about 40% of their taught material. Imagine how high this number would be for a subfield as hard to quantify as nutrition.

Tl;dr: most people are not wary enough of news’ negatives, are a little too nonchalant (not chalant enough?) about the material they choose to spend so many hours of their life reading, and may be lacking in good alternative sources.

True to the tagline, this blog is concerned heavily with learning about the world in a more effective, efficient manner. There are many good sources of information in the world; oddly, mainstream news, tasked solely with being a good source of information, is not one of them.

I originally wrote this as an invective against news before I realized that had been done already. No need to clutter the internet by repeating the argument again. But some things still need clearing up.

Dobelli’s conclusion is that you should quit the news “cold turkey.” But I think there is something to be said for searching for a replacement; surely something out there is better than chaff. Before we dive into improvements though, we best follow the rationalist’s tenet of checking his arguments for correctness. I broadly agree with him, but ultimately find a somewhat softer conclusion dependent on reader to be in order.

Reading the news is a ubiquitous pastime in the developed world. Hearing that people read the news seems to invoke some small aura of respect (at least where I am). A real adult rephrased this as “it’s basically a prerequisite to being considered a full adult/functioning human”. With so much support, I have to wonder if my distrust is misplaced.

When the choices are "I might have overlooked something" or "a TON of other people are crazy," which one you think is more likely says a lot

First, we should specify the kind of news addressed. Until the end of this post, I will be talking about the kind of news you could (in a former era) find in a standard newspaper. Perhaps the local news, perhaps the Chicago Tribune. I want to restrict it to news news though, so let’s ignore online newspaper-affiliated blogs and editorials and focus on the breaking news section, or television news, or radio, or similar.

A compacted version of Dobelli’s 15-point argument would be as follows. Firstly, news is irrelevant and wastes our valuable time. Furthermore, it is manipulative and systematically misleads us. On top of this, it affects us directly by producing stress and harmful mental habits. I will label these irrelevance, deceit, and impairment.

Dobelli has deceit pinned down. He notes that journalists’ incentives directly conflict with our own, causing them to underrepresent important societal knowledge in favor of an undue focus on flashy and catchy stories. We have all noticed the increasing prevalence of clickbait. Even news articles frequently jockey for position by mentioning how the other side is just trying to generate catchy content. He uses as examples:

Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated.

Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated.

Britney Spears is overrated. IPCC reports are underrated.

Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.

The availability heuristic means that we turn this misrepresentation in our information into a misunderstanding of the rates things actually happen in the world. This has direct consequences, like our spending $16b a year on counter-terrorism while car crashes and obesity kill orders of magnitude more people. (The rationality of this specific example can be debated, but the principle of many poor priorities holds generally.)

As leader of the free world, our democratic system somehow still allows us the liberty to control our own information consumption, which privilege we exercise to filter only news sources far on our own side of the political spectrum to comfort us and corroborate our beliefs. This plays into confirmation bias, a widespread and deadly enemy. Even in my well-tended facebook feed, the constant seeping invasion of Daily Kos and Fox News articles reminds me this issue is alive and well.

Along with availability and confirmation, Dobelli notes narrative bias and other deceit issues. If you don’t see these negative aspects of the news, go read points 1, 3, 5, 11, and 12 in his essay.

Moving on to impairment. Given the mechanisms discussed above, it seems obvious the news would have a direct impairing effect on your beliefs about how the world works. However, clearing your life of availability, confirmation, and narrative issues from the news just leads you to be exposed to the exact same issues via human conversation. It also seems unlikely that news significantly contributes to these biases, given that we are already deeply in their grasp by the time we become of news-reading age.

The other points in this category are similarly suspect. He accuses news of promoting stress, creating addiction, stifling creativity, whittling away focus, and fostering passivity. But. Our financial situations and social relationships seem to have a virtual monopoly on our stress. Everything modern is addictive. Everything modern stifles creativity (from video games to school). Everything modern whittles at our focus (see the supposed ADHD epidemic in kids under the typical news-reading age). Kids are addicted to television and passive far before news reaches them. It is hard to debate that news probably contributes negatively in these ways, but the effect sizes are completely swamped by the rest of our world in every case. So let’s ignore somatic issues and concentrate on the information content.

Finally, irrelevance. We have established that the news is deceitful in many ways, but does it have countervailing positive benefits? The answer seems to be heavily dependent on the person.

I have heard that some people feel more attached to the world, more a citizen of the global population, after reading the news. The news can plausibly help you put your life in perspective. Local news may occasionally give you genuinely helpful information about changes to your recycling guidelines. Apparently a lot of people spend very little time on the news, so if you only pay down a few moments on the news each day for these reasons, I think it may definitely be justified.

But aside from developing some overall worldview, it again seems like the actual information given in most news sources is somewhere between pointless and unhelpful. Aside from the actively negative choice of material that is reported on, news runs into two related problems: it is at a very surface level, and it is very repetitive.

The song So It Goes argues, “Lying, breeding, crawling, dying, it’s all in us, always repeating.” While this may pattern-match to a cynic, there is something to be said for noticing such patterns.

Depending on how simplistic you want to be, humans do tend to repeat a few basic instincts over and over and over. This is reflected in our news. If you have followed the Israel-Palestine conflict, the last several years have been roughly the same as the few years before that. Atrocities are committed on the one side; sometimes they are reciprocated, sometimes not. They enter peace talks. They go south. More atrocities. Repeat. Perhaps there is more of interest here. But if so, I certainly don’t see it from the news articles.

I would argue the vast majority of news is of this type. “Sports player injured.” “Trade deal struck.” “Local crime committed.” “War on terror continues with some heartbreaking tragedies.”

If you want to be an expert on trade deals, you don’t want to read the newspaper. If you are young and want to learn about how trade deals work, I’ll give you a google search and a few news articles about them, and then you move on. If you are older and know how trade deals work, reading specifically about TPP is entirely useless, unless you have a referendum or possibility to give your well-reasoned opinion on trade deals. But in this case you want to read an econ blog, a World Bank analysis, or anything but news reports. The news is for reporting: these are concrete facts. These do not delve into the deeper structure underlying the human social condition. (This is painfully evident when you read about the growing trend of computer algorithms writing news articles.)

You can report endless facts on the TPP and what nations are included and how secret it is and what products are covered, but if you read that article by the respected source of the Washington Post, you’ll notice afterward… What have you really learned? Here is a moderately secret trade deal being negotiated. These have happened before. They will happen again. Do you want to live your life like Groundhog Day?

We have painted news as the villain. But what in its place?

To start, I should briefly acknowledge places news is applicable. Firstly, anyone working in a specific sector that needs to keep up with its developments is clearly vindicated. Secondly, even if it’s largely composed of concrete facts and little depth, the news seems plausibly helpful for large portions of rural America and many places overseas. “Provincial” and “urbane” refer more to negative and positive characteristics about knowledge and progressive thought than literal locale, and it seems that a large part of this is due to information. I have heard only anecdotes, but it seems that many people moving out of a small town or third world country find a whole new world with whole different problems than they originally faced. For these people, news seems to make sense as a way to learn about the changing world. News will not yet be repetitive for them, and the information is positive even when filtered through biases. These people may make up a substantial portion of the world, and if it is indeed useful to them, this would solve our earlier question about why society on the whole thinks news is important.

However, most people reading this blog will probably not be uninitiated into modernity. For us, the only purpose news will serve is signaling our conventional adulthood. If you are okay with spending time reading news only to signal to others you’re caught up with the world, I will point out the typical response to peer pressure but won’t argue. My recommendations can balance signaling with information quality.

If you are in the biz only to signal, mainstream news is a reasonable choice (but standard disclaimer about all the negative effects we saw above). But can you do better? Much of the news people read is never brought up in conversation with others. On the other hand, a small number of articles and events seem to be discussed a disproportionate amount of time. This is typical of a power law, common in social networks and widely known to be the distribution of numbers of readers per blog; it seems likely that it holds in news article views too. A great way to take advantage of this is to only read the big articles that come up frequently: this can be accomplished by using reddit, twitter, or facebook to find what most people are viewing. The “trending” sidebar on facebook or twitter gives a good wide-scale view. Various subreddits and some people on twitter can give good narrow views on specific topics. Twitter and facebook can be tailored to your own social network, highly effective at determining what people around you are literally reading and talking about but less efficient when considering all the chaff you must sort through about people’s lives. All three of these websites can be worse time sinks than the news itself, but if you use them right (i.e. keep newsreading and play separate) you can reap significant gains in efficiency.

If you’re somewhere on the spectrum between desiring signaling power and refined understanding, you can choose some mix of this strategy with the following, as many people do. But unlike most people, I hope you realize that the right side of this axis goes far beyond news.

If you reject signaling and are interested exclusively in useful learning, there are much better options available. News is definitely beaten out on average by nonfiction—blogs, books, textbooks, essays, papers—as well as some fiction.

I say average because of course there are no classes of reading which will universally be great. Many blogs are useless and pandering. Books have been written on everything, and many of those things are useless. Textbooks and papers are often too technical or go too deep into fields that aren’t especially relevant. Fiction can be hugely hit or miss. But after some poking around, or reading recommendations or blogrolls from those you trust, you can discern much more effective sources of information and update as you find new ones. Explore briefly, and spend most of your time exploiting the greats.

Fiction first—it is a bit of a different beast, and I have at times strayed far from its camp. However, I have come around to see some as a useful (but usually not efficient) source of insights and connections to feed the neural net. Reading Gaiman, Pratchett, and some poetry gives me this sense. Scott Alexander references a fair amount, especially Lovecraft. Yudkowsky joins other science fiction evangelists who draw many ideas originally from this creative genre, modifying them based on practical considerations. Short stories are great for handling added emotional imbuement in a way essays cannot, like for surprisingly importantmoralconsiderations.

Nonfiction has more evidence of the superiority of its sources in action. Take any typical example of something important in the world you wish to know about—as a case study, I’ll use bitcoin (others available upon request). If you’ve read the news about it, you probably know it’s a decentralized crypto-currency that’s sometimes used on the black market. E.g., if you read this news article, you will learn a good amount but spend much of your time on the mysterious founder and various historical quirks.

The only way to figure out how you should really feel about bitcoin is to read things written by knowledgeable people thinking about the principles of the thing (short, strongly opined, cherry-picked quotations by important execs in news are misleading and do not count). The Stellar blog explains more generally how cryptocurrencies work and why theirs is better. To understand bitcoin technically, papers about the blockstream or Ethereum do wonders. If you aren’t to the point of understanding those, start lower; I think it will take a shorter time than you’d expect to get up to speed, and you are in this for knowledge and to be an informed citizen, right? A short book like 9 Algorithms that Changed the Future is a great book to explain public key cryptography (and 8 other algorithms) for those with no background in math; an intro textbook on cryptography itself can be perused or read in depth if you want to learn more robustly about this topic of vital importance to the future.

This is the beginnings of a structure for determining the answer to the famous privacy vs security question raging in the greater crypto war, which in the last million instances has been resolved only by yelling louder that their side is what America stands for. Speaking of wars, in another moderately less multitudinous post, he also connects bitcoin’s crypto with the difficulty in escaping moderators on the internet, like in the Reddit Wars. At risk of belaboring this point: these are ideas that you will have a higher chance of hearing about by letting monkeys pound on a typewriter than journalists. If you want to transcend surface knowledge, you have to look below the surface.

I think we’ve gone down the nonfiction rabbit hole far enough to peer to the end. News tells you the output of humans tirelessly adhering to their biology and incentives, repeating the same shootings, inventions, wars, diplomacy, and election struggles. Blogs and papers will identify the mechanisms that spawn various facets of this human condition. News is the pixels of Conway’s Game of Life dancing endlessly across the screen. Books and papers will tell you common patterns that are seen. Blogs and essays can identify the rules.

Appendix

Depending on where you are temporally and geographically, you may be aware of many more or many fewer information-dense sources than I—but since I promised a recommendation beyond news, I’ll suggest a few starting points. Their blogrolls are relatively incestuous but can still help you find many more.
First half dozen or so I find most helpful and applicable:

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” —Raphael Sabatini, opening line of Scaramouche (1921)

On the other hand, this blog shall be born middling in laughter and with a sense the world is almost too sane.

Laughter is great. Wonder at the world is great. But these things are bombarding us daily and readily accessible on the internet, while I find it much harder to find sources for piecing together how the world works. Since I abide by the law of comparative advantage, I devote this space to that quest.

This blog’s first claim is we want to understand the world.

This blog’s second claim is that viewing the world as not mad, but in fact, quite sane, will give us significant power for discovering the underlying rules that make the world go round.

While I’ll deal with the second in future posts, the first is a clear prerequisite. Luckily, the legwork has already been done for us at the nexus of the rationality blogosphere, LessWrong. If you don’t want to understand the world, I won’t push you. But if you’re on the edge, I’d strongly recommend it.

If anything is very important to you (raising your kids well, saving your friends), the most reliable way to achieve this goal is to understand it very well. You can desire a thing all you want, but unless you’re in a movie, this won’t get you very far. A recent quiz points out how many of the programs we implement toward various social goals — reducing crime, e.g. — actually increase the problems they are trying to fight. More applicable to you specifically, there are a lot of systematic errors humans make when buying insurance and investing money that will cause many people to lose thousands of dollars over their lifetime.

Means: have your beliefs about the world reflect, as closely as possible, the world’s actual state.

If you don’t care about anything, rationality is probably not right for you. But it is kind of like food: you can get by with very little, but your productivity decreases quickly.

Rationality has had a long and storied history, from Descartes to Leibniz to Korzybski. But the field didn’t progress much past intuition until Kahneman and Tversky kicked off the first wave of modern rationality by finding biases in human thought (there are a lot) and the occasional way to correct them. E.T. Jaynes and other Bayesians expanded the concepts to focus on Bayesian probability theory and formal updates to one’s beliefs, which framework Eliezer Yudkowsky adopted, collected, and expanded upon at LessWrong over several years of blog posts (the best now published as a fantastic e-book). I strongly recommend you read some of LessWrong or the e-book: aside from helping build great thinking habits, it is a fantastic source of concepts that I will make use of time and again.

LessWrong also sparked a diaspora of rationality blogs in various domains, of which this blog aspires to be one. It is now racing after the bandwagon, hopefully soon to be clutching at the rear fender.